There were at least seven distinct responses that teachers offered to Fenton’s prompt. Wow! This makes me think two things:

Fenton’s scenario was so thought-provoking that it yielded an amazing variety of responses.

How come there was so much disagreement about how to act in this scenario?

Part of the disagreement, I think, comes from what went unspoken in Fenton’s mistake. We didn’t know if this mistake was shouted on in a discussion or found on a piece of paper. We don’t know if this is one of those times when we can afford to have a one-on-one conversation with a kid in response to her mistake, or if our response will be scrawled on her paper and returned. Was this a common error, or an isolated mistake? Could our response be an activity for the class instead of a chat?

While one-on-one conversations are crucial in teaching, they are hard to talk about. By their nature, they’re improvisational and somewhat unstructured. I’d also argue that opportunities for one-on-one conversations can be rare, and they get rarer as the number of students in your class grows larger.

Revising the Scenario

So let’s add some details to Fenton’s scenario. This was a mistake in an Algebra 1 class. Smart kids, thoughtful teacher, but when she collects papers after an ungraded check-in she finds that about half her class made Fenton’s mistake. Oh no! She decides that she’s going to launch class the next day with a brief activity to help advance her kids’ thinking.

Her first idea is to try a string of equations. She has three different drafts. Which one would you choose, and why?

Equation String 1

Equation String 2

Equation String 3

Other Activities

Then, she has some other ideas. Maybe equation strings aren’t the right move? She comes up with three other activities: Working With Examples, Which One Doesn’t Belong and Connecting Representations.